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More Than Trust. In spite of all these troubles, the college had begun to occupy a special place in Turkey. When the Sultan's decree lost its power, young Turks began to flock to it. In the 1920s, the new republic was hungry for new ideas, and eventually Robert could claim such alumni as Selim Sarper, Turkey's Ambassador to the U.N., Haydar Cork, Ambassador to the U.S., and Kasim Gulek, secretary-general of the Republican People's Party. Robert has never tried to Americanize its students; it has merely tried to give them a first-rate liberal arts program which includes the best of U.S. teaching. As a result, it is so thoroughly trusted that today 963 of its 1,051 students are Turks.
Last week President Ballantine learned that trust would not be his only asset in the future. Still grateful for the special instruction it gave Turkish officers during World War II, the government wants the college to start a school of business and to expand its engineering school to train 1,000 rather than only 250 students a year. Meanwhile, a group of alumni and friends have organized the Turkish-American Educational Society to supplement Robert's $4,000,000 endowment with gifts of $170,000 a year. In return for all this, Duncan Ballantine hopes to make Robert play an even larger role in the partnership it has formed with Turkey. "The Turks," says he, "have done so much in the last 30 years. What they need, and what we need, is a center for the study of economic development. Our function should be more than merely education. We ought to be helping Turkey develop the ideas and the tools and the data of its economic growth."